Boris Johnson

I've never understood the appeal of Boris Johnson. The standard line seems to be that behind the buffoonish Billy-Bunter persona lurks a sharp operator. I suppose he must be doing something right, being an MP and editor of the Spectator, but that seems to be more to do with his relentless ambition and his willingness to play up to preconceptions rather than any great intelligence or ability.

His latest bit of comment in the Telegraph is, frankly, pathetic:

It is a terrible warning for any leading Arab terrorist. You think you've got away with it. You haven't been associated with the deaths of any westerners for at least 10 years. You've been in a perpetual state of paranoia, in case a US Navy Seal should pop out of your plumbing and peg you where it hurts.

You've been looking under your car, you've been twitching the curtains of your tent in case a Tomahawk cruise missile should be on its way; and just when you think the West has forgotten all about your crimes, they send you nemesis. No, they don't send Bond. They don't send an assassin. They send Tony Blair to meet you, and what does he do? He kisses you on both cheeks!

Laugh? No, neither did I.

He continues:

Yes, my friends, that is apparently to be the fate, somewhere in Tripoli, of the Libyan leader, the man Ronald Reagan called a "mad dog". This is the man whose barbaric regime was unquestionably involved in the murder of hundreds of people, British and Americans, in the sky and on the ground at Lockerbie.

This same Libyan regime was responsible for the shooting in cold blood of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in St James's Square, and for the shipping of heaven knows how much weaponry to the IRA. And how do we choose to requite him for his crimes? According to last night's evening paper, Tony Blair is going to hail his "courage" and the pair are then going to smooch faster than you can say Mwah-mwah al-Gaddafi.

What an amazing way to run a war on terror. The Libyans have a leader who genuinely has a record as long as your arm in sponsoring terror; and he gets the kiss from Blair, because Libya has signalled that it is willing to do business with the West.

In Iraq, by contrast, we had a man who positively rejected the al-Qa'eda network, and who was rejected by them, and who was not associated - in spite of all the nudge-and-wink suggestions of the Bush administration - with any particular group of terrorists or terrorist outrages. And what do we do? We whack him, at considerable cost, and remove his regime; and to be frank I am delighted that we have got rid of Saddam.

That last sentence....clearly Boris had it in mind to write that we should have left Saddam and gone for Gaddafi, but then realised he was heading up his arse with this one, so quickly tacked on that last phrase - which unfortunately makes the whole paragraph incoherent, as well as being rubbish.

He finishes with this touching tale:

The other day a group of schoolchildren came to see me here in Westminster, and a 10-year-old girl stuck up her hand and said, please, she was worried about being blown up in the House of Commons. Was I worried?

I told her very firmly not to worry, and that everything would almost certainly be all right, and that she had less chance of being blown up than she had of being blinded by a champagne cork or decapitated by a Frisbee.

But, afterwards, I must confess that I felt slightly angry that this child should be so troubled, and I blame the grown-ups, and in particular Tony Blair. He made a speech in Sedgefield recently that was quite absurd from a public figure who is meant to be providing reassurance, and encouraging people to go about their businesses as normal.

He said that we were all in "mortal peril" and painted an apocalyptic picture of the threat. Even as I write, his scaremongering is being acted upon by the architects at Westminster. A great pontoon is apparently to be constructed in the river, so that we may not be attacked by al-Qa'eda speedboats. [...]

Yes, there is a threat, but we have had terrorist threats for years in this country. We have had bombs in London and Birmingham and Manchester, but we never said we were "at war".

There is only one reason why the Prime Minister uses this rhetoric, and tries to keep us on a "war footing", and that is his guilty conscience over a different war, where there turned out to be no threat to us at all.

This is the voice of a man who hasn't got a clue.

Comments

[Anthony]

He has rather gone off the rails on Iraq. It was Hutton that did for him, despite being in favour of the war.

[steerpike]

I think you must have misunderstood the article, for the following reasons
1- the writing displays indignance, rather than an attempt at humour
2-It is a largely undisputed fact that Libya has posed more of a threat than Iraq ever has
3-Mr Johnson clearly felt the need to clarify his stance on the war on Iraq after stating point no 2. The idea that we should have bombed Gadaffi rather than Saddam was never implied, what Boris did say was that, based on Blair's criteria for the war, this would perhaps have been a more logical step.